This handy little volume is evidently the result of a good deal of painstaking and conscientious labor. As the production of several hands, it is a monument of somewhat heterogeneous scholarship. It professes to be “critical”; and critical and scholarly we are sure it is, so far as it is indebted to the contributions of Dr. Ezra Abbot, a gentleman whose minute bibliographical knowledge is only equalled by his rare modesty, and by his readiness to place his learning at the disposal of others. To his careful hand, we take it, is due the collection of various readings as given by Griesbach, Lachmann, and the latest editions of Tischendorf and Tregelles. The student will find in this compilation a mass of information which we do not remember to have seen in so compact a form elsewhere. For the rest, the work will doubtless fulfil the purpose announced by the editor-in-chief, as a “book available to the mere English reader,” and will be welcomed by evangelical ministers of all denominations who may have felt more or less keenly the need of supplementing the defects in their early classical education by some easy artificial helps. How convenient, for example, when we run against the word γυνή, to find, on the authority of Messrs. Hastings and Hudson, that, in a given number of passages, the majority in fact, it signifies woman, undoubtedly woman, whereas in several other given passages,
including 1 Cor. ix. 5, it means wife—even though there may be some misgivings about the “margin.” Whether or not it be “critical,” under cover of scholarship, to turn a supposed Greek concordance into nothing more nor less than a quiet vindication of the accuracy of the King James Version, we leave it to ordinary unbelievers to determine.
Life of John Bunyan, with Notices of some of his Contemporaries, and Specimens of his Style. By D. A. Harsha, M.A., author of “Life of Philip Doddrige, D.D.,” etc. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1871.
Nothing, we suppose, is more likely to strike the ordinary Catholic reader, supposing him even to waste his time over books of the kind, than the great meagreness and poverty of what are known by Protestants as religious lives. Even a non-Catholic, like Mr. Matthew Arnold, has somewhere commented on the superiority of Catholic biographies to Protestant ones, with that air of easy insolence which has made him anything but a pleasing subject for contemplation to the majority of his countrymen and co-religionists.
Mr. Harsha’s life of the allegorizing tinker of Bedford can boast of no advantage in this respect over other efforts of the same general description. It is not, we should say, the fault of the biographer, who seems to have genuine religious instincts, and to be principally hampered by his ignorance of what true spirituality means, and the poverty of the material he works in. These, however, are in his position necessary evils.
This book has other faults for which he is more actively responsible. A man who wonders that Bunyan should have been molested for his religious views under what he, perhaps facetiously, calls the “mild rule of Cromwell” (a characterization that John Evelyn
would have been as slow to endorse as any Catholic Irishman of Zedah) and is puzzled to account for his freedom during the reign of the Second James, needs something besides an acquaintance with the Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s sermons to qualify him for the task of a biographer. Perhaps, however, a thorough knowledge of history would be as successful an agent in the work of un-Protestantizing a sincere man as any other merely human one that could be named.
Graduale de Tempore et de Sanctis, juxta Ritum Sacrosanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ cum cantu Pauli V. Pont. Max. jussu reformato cui addita sunt officia postea approbata sub auspiciis Sanctissimi Domini Nostri Pii PP. IX. Curante Sacr. Rituum Congregatione, cum privilegio. Ratisbonæ, Neo-Eboraci et Cincinnatii: Sumptibus, chartis et typis Frederici Pustet.
About the time of the opening of the Œcumenical Council, the firm of F. Pustet were permitted by special indult to publish a revised edition of the Gradual known as the Medicean. A commission was appointed by the Sacred Congregation of Rites to undertake this revision, but the suspension of the Council and the political troubles ensuing prevented the completion of their labors. A dispensation, however, was granted to Mr. Pustet to publish and sell the work, adding the portion yet unrevised as it stands in the original edition. We reserve a fuller notice for some future date, when we hope to lay before our readers a critical essay on the various editions of the Gradual and other books of chant published in Europe and Canada.
The Grand Demonstration in Baltimore and Washington, D. C., in honor of the XXVth Anniversary of the Election of Pius IX. to the Chair of St. Peter, June 17, 18, 19. A.D. 1871. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co.